Here's a bit of a blog post I started on within a few days after the presidential election:
....and now it's apparent to anyone who can comprehend that the U.S. is much much worse off than most thought. By that I mean that white people in the U.S. are deeply disturbed emotionally and cognitively. They're genuinely dangerous, to others, to the planet and to themselves.
The depth and breadth of this ugliness of white supremacy that is embraced by we white people has become so malignant and huge that those infected with it are now out in the open and celebrating a debacle.
And those of us who struggle to resist...obviously didn't struggle enough.
Will we now learn? Will we? And...even if we do...and embark on the painful and ugly business of accepting and working thorough our horribleness and effectively resisting white supremacy...what price will the vulnerable have to pay for our lassitude and laziness and embrace of obliviousness?
I was old enough to finally begin to glimpse how deeply deficient we white people in the USA were when Ronald Reagan was elected. We've been in something akin to a death spiral ever since. We white people have made this...and we must change it. It is up to us and no one else.
The innocent and vulnerable should not have to pay for our failure...but I fear they will.
By the way...if you hear a white person say "but I'm not racist"...know that you are in the presence of an enabler/practitioner of racist ideology. If you say it...then go read this and get to work on yourself.
As you can see from the above...I was piling on to the "voters"...and from what's occurred in the writings of many since I wrote that...I wasn't alone. See here, here and here.
But...it's untrue.
In fact, a relatively large majority of the voters for the president rejected the overt "isms" in the person of the president and opted for the theoretically less bigoted candidate. By a margin of around 1,700,000 (or more) voters. The "official" count is still underway so there isn't a final total yet. Here's an early story about this when the margin was just over 1 million.
Hmmm...what's going on here?
I was sitting in a class last week when it occurred to me that maybe...just maybe...we're being offered an opportunity to see an irrational aspect of our society's history (decisions made be people from the past) coming out of it's invisibility (becoming apparent because it is getting ready to operate) but we've been deeply and thoroughly taught to not think about it or notice it but rather to accept it as "normal" when...in fact...it's actually bizarre and operates to scuttle "democracy".
That "normalized" absurdity is that thing called the electoral college.
On December 19th the "real" voting for the presidency occurs. There are 538 "electors" and it is their vote that decides who is president. The big election where all the eligible voters get their say doesn't actually decide who's president...the people who vote in the electoral college decide that...and they can vote for anyone they want.
Contact your state's electors and tell them you want a democracy...you want their voting to reflect the voting of the majority of the voters...there's still time to stop an oncoming disaster that rejects what the majority of voting Americans want.
All the hoopla re Trump's "victory" is because in theory he won the "majority" of the electoral college voters. That...if it occurs the way everyone is writing and talking about it...will be Trump even though he was clearly rejected by the majority of American citizens who voted on who they wanted for their president.
Clinton won the popular vote...by a margin greater than the margin in past elections that put people into the white house. In other words, in just a few weeks (December 19th) the United States is gearing up to put someone into the office of the presidency in opposition to who the majority of the voters supported.
The "will of the people", the "decision of the voters" is apparently going to be reversed and the candidate who lost the election is going to be crowned as president. That's a "democracy"?
What is going on here? How can a "democracy" result in someone becoming the president in clear opposition to the majority of the voters? A system like that is something other than a "democracy" wherein the vote of a citizen counts to show who they want in a particular office. It's a system...yes...but it's not a "democracy".
The citizens of the United States have a narrow window of opportunity here to demand that their "democracy" operate like a democracy. Trump is not the president yet...the vote by the electors on December 19th will decide who occupies the white house. That's when we'll see who is president. The citizen's vote does not decide that...the 538 people who are electors decide that.
Lambasting the voters for opting for bigotry and racism and sexism is erroneous. A considerable majority of the voters selected Clinton and rejected Trump. (I totally believe any vote for Trump is a travesty and wrong...but that's not the point I'm addressing here...the fact is that he lost the popular vote...strongly.)
And yet...most of the "analyzing" I'm seeing online is all about the horridness of (mostly white) Americans and their support for racism and sexism. When...in fact...the majority of all voters rejected such awful and odious "isms" in favor of a candidate who (theoretically) also opposes such ugliness.
See what I mean about "invisibility"? Much of the writing and talking is writing and talking about an untruth. We do not have a democracy (in regard to who becomes president)...we have a system where 538 people decide...for millions and millions of citizens and the popular vote of all those citizens is only vaguely and only in theory influential on how those 538 electors vote. The electors decide (and they can vote for anyone they want)...not the citizens who voted in the national election.
But...we (me included, see partial blog post above) mostly talk and think and write as if we have a system where the majority of the voters decide who is president. They (we) do not. The electors decide.
How can it be that we think of this as a "democracy" where the majority of the voters decide on a candidate...and zip zoop...suddenly it is the rejected candidate who becomes the president?
Something weird is going on here and the weirdness is being accepted as "normal" and not weird. I suspect that "normalizing" of the absurd (the defeated candidate becoming president) is a manifestation of invisibling.
And...the American voting public is being lambasted and depicted as supporting racism and sexism when in fact the majority of the voters rejected those awful things.
But...we're not noticing that...we're motoring on as if that didn't happen...when it did. I think that's part of how to make invisible or not seen a truth that's right in front of you and it is, in fact, clearly visible if you just look and think about it.
I'm still thinking about this...and if you see a hole in my thinking...tell me. Please.
Another part of this that's amazing to me is that I've expressed this absurdity on Facebook and people...some anyway...just gloss right over it.
I'm saying...look...and think.
We're bamboozling ourselves if we don't dig deeply into the absurdity of the majority of the voters (a big majority) rejecting Trump and yet...the electors are getting ready to put him into office even when he was rejected by the voters. What in hell is going on? That's not how a "democracy" is supposed to work.
I'm not ignoring or denying that it is horrendous that millions voted for Trump...but...it is a denial of truth if we also do not realize that more (apparently millions more) voted against him than did for him. It's untruthful and erroneous to accuse the majority of voters of supporting racism and sexism when if fact they did not.
Here's a social experiment you can try on your own. If you follow what I'm trying to convey in this blog post...go on some social media platform and point this out and watch what happens. I suspect you will find that what you say will be denied or ignored or ridiculed or in some other way minimized or rejected.
If that happens...and I suspect that it will...then you will (I think) be seeing an example of how some of the processes of invisibling operate in the consciousness of people.
We've been conditioned to believe/pretend that voting for the presidency is "democracy" when in fact it is not. I've brought this point up in person in two group settings and in both instances people just ignored it and went on deploring and decrying the awfulness of the voters for embracing the ugliness of oppression.
Let me know what you think...and...if you try the experiment...let me know what happened. I gotta tell you, this is one of the damnedest things I've ever seen in my life.
I'm not excluding me...I started wondering about this crap way back in 2000 when that creep Bush was put into the white house...even though he lost the popular vote by over 500,000. Up until then I had always gone along with the pretense of a "democratically" elected President. But something started stinking to me then. This time there's no doubt...something reeks. And everyone is pretending/believing/thinking that it doesn't.
We do not "democratically" elect the president. And...we're on the cusp of once again sticking somebody in the white house who was clearly and strongly rejected by a majority of the voters. All the while, pretending that "the people have spoken".
And...many/most are pointing fingers at the "voters" and condemning them for something they did not do. In fact, if it happens this time, that will be the 5th time it has occurred in 54 presidential elections.
Almost 10% of the time the loser of the popular vote...the one who was rejected by the "will of the people"...becomes the president. I don't know what you would call such a system...but democracy it is not. Wakey wakey.
This is surreal...and I think maybe...when the invisible becomes visible...that's exactly how it feels...surreal.
2 comments:
Interesting. I don't know enough about the Electoral College, but some of the comments I read during the campaign seemed to suggest that it was in place to make sure certain larger urban states wouldn't override smaller rural states. In that sense making it more fair as urban areas tend to vote Demographic and rural areas tend to vote Republican.
But I didn't quite realize that people don't actually vote for the President, but vote for the electors who decide how to vote, so basically robbing the "popular" vote of any real power. In essence then, millions of people voting are being paid lip service to, in favour of 538 electors who get to make the vote that counts. Wow.
The other thing I still don't understand is why a few swing states as they're called are more important than most of the other states. Because doesn't that mean that all the votes in the non-swing states are basically irrelevant too?
And I'm one of the ones who made a lot of noise about voter isms too, so may have to rethink that. Thanks for giving me more to ponder! :)
Thank you for commenting HGV. Pardon my tardiness in responding. You voice an example of coded language in your comment when you write: "...larger urban states wouldn't override smaller rural states." I don't know if you've noticed but national narratives here in the U.S. tend to paint a much prettier picture than the actual doings of the country. The phrase you used is code where "rural states" means states that support slavery and "urban states" means non-slave states. The electoral college was designed to give disproportionate power to slavery states because they were fearful that a popular vote might mean the abolishing of slavery and they refused to join in forming a nation unless they were given an electoral college structure which enhanced their power. But that doesn't sound nice so the rural and urban is substituted instead. Aren't we nifty? And now...we're staggering toward installing a president because, in fact, some citizen votes count more than others (the number of electors per state do not proportionally represent the number of voters). All in service to a structure designed to uphold slavery. America...where land theft, genocide and slavery is us...but...we calls ourselves the "land of the free". If it weren't so horrid and destructive...it would be funny.
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